Functional Stylistic Analysis Of "Berne Convention For The Protection Of Literary And Artistic Works"

Law is the embodiment of power, and hence the language employed in law should be characterized by being powerful. This thesis aims at discovering how this powerful characteristics of law are implied in the language, in other words, how to build up the language to express the powerful characteristics of law. The author takes one of the classical International Conventions-"Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works" (hereafter designated as "Berne Convention"), as an individual case to study its language phenomena from the perspective of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and conducts functional stylistic analysis (FSA) to find out the language features in legal language.The thesis from the perspective of Halliday's systemic functional linguistics conducts the FSA of Berne Convention. The thesis makes a FSA of Berne Convention separately from the clause and discourse level, which include the analysis of the features of theme, mood, transitivity, voice, clause complexes, graphology and vocabulary cohesion, grammatical metaphor, context of situation. Conclusions: the legal language possesses the features of authoritativeness, precision, conciseness, neutrality, consistence and conservatism; The POWERFUL language can be shaped by virtue of the functional choice of these langue features from the linguistic system.This thesis can be considered as an interdisciplinary study of both Linguistics and Jurisprudence, which aims at helping the language workers to get more familiar with legal language as well as helping national legislators, administrators and professional people to gain a better understanding of the Berne Convention for the purpose of more constantly effective and uniform applications of it to promote the protection of intellectual property in China.